The history of supercomputers

Cray 1

CDC followed up with the 7600 four years later in 1968, but Cray left soon after to set up his own supercomputer company, Cray Research. In 1976, the Cray 1 was released. It was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it was primarily tasked with nuclear weapons modeling (hooray for the Cold War!)

Clocked at 80MHz, the Cray 1 used integrated circuits (chips) and increased word size (64-bit) to obtain performance of 136 megaflops — a lot faster than the 3-megaflops CDC 6600. 1,662 printed circuit boards with up to 144 ICs on each were crammed into one of the most distinctive-looking supercomputers ever made. Again, Freon liquid cooling was used.

The shape, incidentally, wasn’t a homage to Star Trek — it actually served a purpose. Speed-dependent modules were placed on the inside edge of the computer, where wire lengths were shorter — without it, the timing would be all wrong and 80MHz wouldn’t have been achievable. The modern day equivalent is the laying out of motherboard traces so that everything works in perfect synchrony at billions of hertz.

The Cray 1 would go on to be one of the most successful supercomputers of all time, with over 80 units sold between 1976 and 1982, for between $5 and $8 million a piece (about $25 million in today’s money — a significant reduction from the $60-million CDC 6600).

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m0r1arty

Excellent piece! If you can track down a copy, Sony Vita(?) shops in the UK had a promo newspaper given away in their shops mid-January 2012 which broke down which countries used supercomputers, the combined flops of said computers and a break-down of how they were used (I remember the UK’s mostly being ‘logistics’). It would compliment all your research here well and show what they get used for in different parts of the world.

Normally I don’t like the gimmick of spreading an article out over 10 pages – but in this case it was well worth it!

m0r1arty

Excellent piece! If you can track down a copy, Sony Vita(?) shops in the UK had a promo newspaper given away in their shops mid-January 2012 which broke down which countries used supercomputers, the combined flops of said computers and a break-down of how they were used (I remember the UK’s mostly being ‘logistics’). It would compliment all your research here well and show what they get used for in different parts of the world.

Normally I don’t like the gimmick of spreading an article out over 10 pages – but in this case it was well worth it!

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

There’s always the ‘print’ button in the top right, if you wanna see the whole story on one page :)

Am I to assume you think there is a digital copy available? I can find a flea’s g-spot on a bear with my sleuthing skills and can only attest to seeing a physical copy of a newspaper/magazine in one of their stores – need a UK gamer type person to help us out. Good article though (lots of pictures!)

As for the Print button, IT WORKS! That’s a first, sites used to have it all readable in one page – but it seemed to go out of fashion for a while. gg ET!

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Yeah, it works just about, but the formatting is a bit screwy. We’d like to fix it at some point in the future.

A flea’s g-spot on a bear? :P I’m trying to picture it — and I have a very vivid imagination — but… I just can’t.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Yeah, it works just about, but the formatting is a bit screwy. We’d like to fix it at some point in the future.

A flea’s g-spot on a bear? :P I’m trying to picture it — and I have a very vivid imagination — but… I just can’t.

David Charles

I can’t see the ‘print’ button to save me, using either Firefox or Chrome. Can you clue me in?

Nice collection of information; I normally don’t care for the multi-page gallery approach either, so would like to see the printer-friendly version.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

There’s always the ‘print’ button in the top right, if you wanna see the whole story on one page :)

…..and the nvidia GTX 680 based on GK104 is capable of pushing more than 3 TeraFlops god damn it.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Yep, some Kepler-based GPU will be used in that Titan supercomputer that will replace Jaguar.

I’m sure most/all new supercomputers will use GPUs, or many-core CPUs like Intel’s Knight’s Ferry.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Yep, some Kepler-based GPU will be used in that Titan supercomputer that will replace Jaguar.

I’m sure most/all new supercomputers will use GPUs, or many-core CPUs like Intel’s Knight’s Ferry.

Juan Monico

Not much of a history of supercomputers. What about ILLIAC 1 through IV, PEPE and BSP ?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

That’s just a straight-up computer :)

Read the first few sentences! The term ‘supercomputer’ was only coined because the CDC 6600 was so much faster than the competition.

http://twitter.com/gwsyoung Stewart Young

I think if do some research you will find most oil companies and chemical companies have more that one HPC / supercomputer system in house.

James Tolson

best article i have read on this for a long time, these where proper machines not the multipurpose server crap used today thats inefficient and uses way too much energy, these supercomputers and mainframes where designed to perfect for the tasks in hand, the last company that used this approach (numa) was SGI/Cray, unfortunately like i said no one designs awesome machine wonders like these no more, not when companies find u can link up cheap pc’s in racks (servers) for cheap as chips :-(

Ian S

My Uncle was VP for US and then Pres. for Canada of CDC.. we used to have a dial up terminal that let us log onto the mainframes in Montreal and play vector based games like tank war.. at 5 years old, ~ 1972, I thought everyone had this type of thing at home.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

I don’t think Tank Wars existed in 1972…!

But still, very cool that you got to play with those early supercomputers :)

An excellent article. But, shouldn’t the first supercomputer be the first computer – Colossus? Especially considering that it was parallel processing and the next fastest thing was a mechanical adding machine…

http://twitter.com/k6rtm k6rtm

Let’s see… Burroughs ILLIAC IV, IBM 360/91 and 370/195, TI-ASC, Goodyear STARAN (yes, they had a supercomputer as well as a blimp), to name a few.

One of the things which still separates supercomputers (of decades ago) from the blazing fast processors of today is the I/O architecture which allows supercomputers to handle massive amounts of data.

That and requiring large water mains for cooling…

http://twitter.com/SoftwareWorlds SoftwareWorld

But no supercomputer can come close to the human brain in versatility yet.

http://twitter.com/gwsyoung Stewart Young

In about 188 week!

http://twitter.com/SoftwareWorlds SoftwareWorld

Sure they can play chess etc..but show me a supercomputer that can think , play games , drive , talk , listen , eat food , reproduce etc.

Anonymous

I agree
with others and excellent article. Whenever I think of supercomputers I
always envision the Cray 1, I had never even heard of the CDC6600. Thanks
for the info.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

The CDC 6600 was news to me, too!

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

Young pup:-) The CDC 6600 was what the University of Illinois ran its version of the PLATO system on in the 70’s. It was so unbelievably cool (distributed timesharing with realtime graphics and multiplayer games, 35 years ago!) that it helped hook me on computers. Ray Ozzie got his start working on it. I tracked down a terminal at their Chicago campus when I was in high school (and had only ever used punch cards) after (I recall) reading about it in Ted Nelson’s book on Dream Machines.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Damn straight! My first computer was an 8086 Olivetti, I think. Maybe an Amstrad. Actually, I had a ZX Spectrum before those. But yeah… you have about 20 years on me, I think… or more…

Pretty cool that you used a CDC 6600 though!

My university had some early computers — some PDP things, I think — but no supercomputers. My university lecturer did write the first MUD on one of those computers, though!

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

The CDC 6600 was news to me, too!

Anonymous

Sebastian,
Very good article. A nice follow up might be the near Super computers, smaller size and price where more folks could afford not only the initial cost but the day to day operating costs, power, cooling, and maintenance. Yes the computer ran a bit slower, but the ability to run your job on a slower machine, vs, getting no time at all on a larger system was an asset. Many innovations were a result of the smaller machines and companies that produced them. My own work history started with 4 Phase, then Floating Point “FPS”, Alliant who first used the i860 and message passing, Kendall Square Research, and SGI/CRAY. But also there was Convex, Multiflow, Thinking Machines, and others. Much of the early CGI work for movies was done one these slower cheaper computers. Concepts such as Nvidia’s, ‘CUDA’ language/GPU usage was used at Alliant in the 80’s.
So all goes in circles, each technological development is reused and is faster and smaller.

Doug

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Cool — I haven’t heard of Alliant at all. Truth be told, I don’t know much before the Earth Simulator (I remember that being the first supercomputer that really made big waves on the internet, mostly thanks to Slashdot and the like).

I’ll try to do some research :)

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

There were a (now hard to imagine) huge variety of different (and now mostly forgotten) computer systems in the 1980’s. At Sun, we worked with other computer vendors on something like 75 different ports of our NFS software to various computer OSes
(including to Alliant). Rt. 128 around Boston had a mini-computer or min-supercomputer company at just about every exit. DEC (of course), DG, Alliant, Prime, Wang, and a string of others. Even CAD companies like Computervision, Valid and Daisy had their own computers — and not like today where people slap a label on a standard Mobo, but real custom stuff they all insisted was essential to protect their business.

Between Silicon Valley & Boston there were also 21 different “JAWS” (Just another workstation) companies, all running slightly different (or vastly different) operating systems (IBM RTOS, DEC VMS, Apollo Domain, etc.). DOS had mostly unified the PC space on a single OS by then (ex-Apple, of course).

Added to that were the AI-specific computer architectures, like Symbolics and LMI. Plus a few mainframe architectures, starting with IBM, obviously.

Unix (the great equalizer) leveled the playing field and definitely simplified things, then Windows did the same for the desktop as PCs over-ran workstations in volume.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Man, so much happened back then! Kinda sucks that I missed out on it all, to be honest.

It’s almost like… when you look at those charts that show various species… and how they get killed off during big extinction-level events. Back in your day (ha), you had a huge ecosystem of different species… and then Wintel came along. BOOM!

http://www.cardinalphoto.com David Cardinal

No worries. The cycle seems to repeat in various ways. There were a zillion browsers in the 90’s, then there were 2, now there are a bunch again… Programming languages sort of settled in on C(++) for awhile, then the web hit and now there are zillions again. You’ll have plenty of stories for your kids about how there used to be so many Linux distros:-)

George Matkovits

Sadly the history of computer architecture is completely lost from around 1990 onward! I used to work in a team of ~dozen people led by the CDC’s Arden Hills Division’s Chief designer; Kurt Alexander. I was part of a 3 person sub-team working on predicting future performance of proposed architectures. Our final proposal, before CDC folded in 1993, was the current CPU architecture of the Intel PC Chip. After CDC’s demise our engineering team dissolved and its members joined various other companies. At least one of them went to work for HP and was lent to Intel.
CDC also had an engineering team in Toronto who we (I) worked with very closely. Some of its members went to work for AMD. The major difference between the Arden Hills (AH) and the Intel/AMD architectures was how the PC’s ‘classical’ instruction set was translated into RISK instructions for the AH architecture. Our original AH CPU architecture used the MIPS instruction set for marketing reasons!
Interestingly the first Intel chip’s screw-up was caused by the ‘technology bias’ of the CDC person working there! He was an extremely smart and persuasive person but never learned from Mr Cray that ‘God made data in small clusters’! Neither did the Japanese nor the designers of the CDC Star computer! The Star could do only one thing well; Simulate Nuclear explosions. Eventually it was used to design the neutron bomb and convince Mr Gorbachev that the Soviet Tank Armies would be beaten by it!
When he visited in 1983 CDC he specially asked to be shown the ‘Neutron Bomb’ computer. So even if the development costs of the Star100 bankrupted CDC it ended the Cold War and led to the eventual demise of the soviet Union. Its chief engineer an ex-marine Neil Lincoln made the original architecture work and probably he deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom for helping to win the Cold War!
While the HP/Intel chips used Intel’s semiconductor technology, AMD’s architecture were built on IBM’s
semiconductor technology.
If there will ever be a Nobel for CPU architecture, IMO the first award should go jointly to Mr Cray and Mr Alexander! — George Matkovits (Minnesota)

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

It always amazes me who comes out of the woodwork in ExtremeTech’s comments … :)

Thanks a lot for taking the time to tell your bit of history!

Gary Moose

Yeah, when I got out of the Navy in 1985 I went to work as a Field Engineer with ELXSI which was a supercomputer manufacturer out of Silicon Valley. It supported up to 12 CPU (Each 3 boards) and 4 IOCP (Input/Output processors). Minimun configuration wass 1/2 million dollars. It was about 6ft long x 3ft wide x 7ft high. These computers were used with Nasa for data acquistion, Circuit manufacturers,Walt Disney, and any thing that needed nunmber crunching.
I just have one question — Where does the infamous IBM Watson stand ?

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Cool :) They sound like fairly small supercomputers.

Watson isn’t all that big either. I don’t think he would even class as a supercomputer by today’s standards (or maybe a small one at best).

Watson ranks 98th on the top 500 supercomputers list from June 2011, I would definitely call it a supercomputer

according to IBM – Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

How ’bout that! I guess in this case it’s simply high up by virtue of being NEW. (Relatively few supercomputers are turned on each year. Top500 has lots of really old computers on it :)

Thanks for commenting.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Cool :) They sound like fairly small supercomputers.

Watson isn’t all that big either. I don’t think he would even class as a supercomputer by today’s standards (or maybe a small one at best).

Watson’s main power is the software!

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Cool :) They sound like fairly small supercomputers.

Watson isn’t all that big either. I don’t think he would even class as a supercomputer by today’s standards (or maybe a small one at best).

Watson’s main power is the software!

Gary Moose

Yeah, when I got out of the Navy in 1985 I went to work as a Field Engineer with ELXSI which was a supercomputer manufacturer out of Silicon Valley. It supported up to 12 CPU (Each 3 boards) and 4 IOCP (Input/Output processors). Minimun configuration wass 1/2 million dollars. It was about 6ft long x 3ft wide x 7ft high. These computers were used with Nasa for data acquistion, Circuit manufacturers,Walt Disney, and any thing that needed nunmber crunching.
I just have one question — Where does the infamous IBM Watson stand ?

Anonymous

What happened to Seymore’s 2nd Supercomputer after the CDC 6600, the CDC 7600. The 7600 was actually more initivative than the Cray 1 (originally the 8600.)

ibsteve2u

!0 petaflops, and computers still can’t provide the correct answer to “Which of these pants make me look skinny?”.

I am disappointed that Control Data’s ETA and/or Star supercomputers were not included, especially since they both some very advanced features.

Anonymous

I am disappointed that Control Data’s ETA and/or Star supercomputers were not included, especially since they both some very advanced features.

http://profile.yahoo.com/2ORCJ2BBS72RFZCEBDH5SJJZWY A. C. Jennings

Brought back some great memories working for Control Data in the 60’s. Started wondering about Steve Clothier…where are you???/

doseas

The CDC 6600 brings back fond memories of late nights at Vogelback Computing Center (Northwestern University) and Chess 3.x and 4.x. I think that I still have boxes of job control cards and Kronos manuals in my garage. NU had upgraded to the 6600 the year I arrived on campus (1977) and it was replaced or supplemented with a couple of CDC Cyber models (I forget the specific numbers) before I graduated in 1981. A year or two later, Northwestern acquired a Cray X-MP. Fun times!

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